Authority vs. Democracy: Prussian Officials in the German Elections of 1898 and 1903

The suffrage for the German Reichstag had by the 1890s become the most potent symbol of democratic ideas in imperial Germany. ‘Universal, equal, secret, and direct’, as contemporaries described it, the Reichstag suffrage stood in contrast to restrictive state suffrages as a model of liberty and fairness. By the turn of the century, 70–80 per cent of adult male German citizens took advantage of their right to participate in this, the freest of all German political arenas.